Fugitive Forms and Fading Memories in Joan Jonas’s “Empty Rooms”
Installation view, Joan Jonas: Empty Rooms, Gladstone Gallery, New York, 2025. Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery.
Joan Jonas is no stranger to ghosts. Throughout her long career, she has played with shadowy personas, disembodied voices, obscured bodies, partial memories, and beings simultaneously absent and present. In the artist’s latest installation at Gladstone Gallery, however, she confronts death, grief, and loss for the first time, drawing on themes already present in her work to tell a new story. Somber, nonlinear, and fragmented, Empty Rooms is also characteristically reiterative, echoing mainstay features of Jonas’s work. Each portion hails from a different place; some are new, some are borrowed from previous works, some are collected. The disparate pieces work together to present remainders and memories left behind when things and people pass.
On the wall just beyond the entrance are the words “In Memory,” followed by a column of eight sets of initials—clearly people important to the artist who are no longer with us. I can guess the identities of some of the deceased, but naming is besides the point. The exhibition is not a personal meditation on specific losses, or Jonas’s explicit individual experiences. Rather, it is an inquiry into loss itself, moving through disappearing places, stories, and environments, as well as people.
Installation view, Joan Jonas: Empty Rooms, Gladstone Gallery, New York, 2025. Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery.
The installation consists of several discrete elements: a towering grid of crumpled drawings of spindly blue trees, a softly-colored and shadowy projection, suspended paper structures resembling homes or buildings, and a small wooden painted whale on a pedestal. The drawings and paper structures are reminiscent of many similar features in her past works, such as Jonas’s hanging drawings of fish in Moving Off the Land II (2019), or her collections of animal drawings in They Come to Us Without a Word (2015), grouped in schools of fish or swarms of bees. In Empty Rooms, however, what first appears expected soon takes on another tone. In many of Jonas’s such drawings of animals, there is a kind of spirit contained within them, something she has previously referenced. Accordingly, there is an energy and vitality to the drawings. They are not still lifes, or, to use the French term, natures mortes—dead nature. They do not show animals from a scientific distance; instead, they show them in the middle of living. In Empty Rooms, the trees at first appear familiar, but hold a quiet stillness. Though they are living things from nature, they appear dead. Inked with thin, creeping lines stretching across crumpled paper, none of them have leaves. They are like ghosts of trees, left after life is gone, still standing, but not quite the same. The paper structures are each lit from within with thin lines of light, illuminating the dark gallery space. Some are intact, particularly two house-shaped sculptures that rest on the floor. Those suspended, however, seem to be in the process of bursting apart mid-air, light spilling out of missing walls or roofs. They evoke old structures, crumbling after years of use, no longer able to provide shelter.
In other works, re-engaging the same forms, such as cones, hoops, dogs, and snakes, has the effect of unfinished business, of unmoored and unfixed meaning. Inspired by art historian Aby Warburg, known for his iconographic studies, Jonas builds her own shifting iconography throughout her oeuvre, in which the same form can take on infinite interpretations. Her signature cones, for example, are used as knitting needles in early performances of The Juniper Tree (1976), and again as stand-ins for glaciers and mountains in Volcano Saga (1983), to name only two of many. Here, though, her remixing takes on new implications. Features no longer seem fugitive, slipping in and out of different contexts. Instead, the various elements of the installation appear as what is left behind. Jonas takes remainder parts, creating something inherently reminiscent of the past. Instead of shedding previous meanings, they only index them, building a kind of haunted house, some place that was once full but is now empty.
The protected video shows young girls walking with canes, straddling processes of aging against footage of slowly spinning wind turbines. This projection comes from Jonas’s installation representing the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2015, They Come to Us Without a Word. Installed with many of Jonas’s gestural drawings of various creatures, the title refers to animals. The drawings and projection together tell a story about nature, and about humans’ place alongside it. That is not without loss, as is highlighted by the wind turbines and evocation of climate change, but in Empty Rooms, the same projection instead takes on the idea of an unending march of time, of a relentlessness, of the inevitability of nature.
Installation view, Joan Jonas: Empty Rooms, Gladstone Gallery, New York, 2025. Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery.
Many of the videos that made up the Venice presentation used recordings of ghost stories, told by the inhabitants of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where Jonas has spent her summers for most of her life. The whale sculpture is from Cape Breton as well, its white paint fading, with a metal spring as a geyser coming out of its blowhole. The stories are from a previous time, a time “before the electricity came in,” as quoted by Ann Reynolds in her Artforum review of the exhibition. Here, however, the soundtrack has been replaced by a new piano composition by Jonas’s longtime collaborator and renowned jazz musician Jason Moran. Though the feeling is melancholy, it changes the work entirely—now, there is no voice left. The whale and the stories are from times and mythologies made inaccessible by modern technologies, kept alive and present only in memory. Memory is also a technology, one that inevitably grows obsolete and disappears forever.
Empty Rooms is on view at Gladstone Gallery from March 1 to April 12, 2025.
